Unshod (Feet for the Path)

Here are the sounds of Wear. It rattles stone on stone. It sucks its teeth. It sings. It hisses like the rain. It roars. It laughs. It claps its hands. Sometimes I think it prays. In winter, through the ice, I've seen it moving swift and black as Tune, without a sound. 

Here are the sights of Wear. It falls in braids. It parts at rocks and tumbles round them white as down or flashes over them in silver quilts. It tosses fallen trees like bits of straw yet spins a single leaf as gentle as a maid. Sometimes it coils for rest in darkling pools and sometimes leaps its banks and shatters in the air. In autumn I've seen it breathe a mist so think and grey you'd never know old Wear was there at all. 

Each day, for years and years, I've gone and sat in it. Usually at dusk I clamber down and slowly sink myself to where it laps against my breast. Is it too much to say, in winter, that I die? Something of me dies at least. 

First there's the fiery sting of cold that almost stops my breath, the aching torment in my limbs. I think I may go mad, my wits so outraged that they seek to flee my skull like rats a ship that's going down. I puff. I gasp. Then inch by inch a blessed numbness comes. I have no legs, no arms. My very heart grows still. The ancient flesh I wear is rags for all I feel of it. 

"Praise, praise!" I croak. Praise God for all that's holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself, old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death.

from Godric by Frederick Buechner 

I have a friend who has found that wearing shoes in college is an optional activity. More often than not I see her going shoeless about campus. My friend was barefoot again in our religion class on Thursday, where we read God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We also read that poem when I was in AP English last year – at least, I think it was AP English, because I could hear Mr. H's voice when our prof was reading it – and that, together with my friend's running about unshod, reminded me of Godric.

Godric was an AP English book, a fictional account of the life of St. Godric of Finchale. Buechner writes in medieval Anglo-Saxon style, which can be a little hard to understand, especially at first. At the same time, it makes the book even more amazing that it already is. There's a reason my copy of it came to college with me.

The passage above is one we spent some time on in class. Our teacher handed out sheets of paper with that passage divided into lines, and we each took one here and one there and read them. We stood in a circle in our classroom and read them. We spread ourselves out in the darkened auditorium and read them. We stood on the concrete around the landscape in front of school and read them. We roamed about the lawn – unshod – and read them.

As Hopkins's poem implies, there's something unique about walking around unshod. He references it as a connection to the earth – or a lack of it, as the feet in his poem are all shod. In AP English, we found a bit of fun in walking about unshod, and a bit of grace.

Godric, too, walked about unshod – in fact, he spent the last sixty or so years of his life that way. In fact, one of the chapters of Buechner's book is titled after Godric's feet.

"Poor feet," I said, "I've used you ill for Jesu's sake. I've tramped with you a thousand miles and more without a scrap of hide to ease your way. I've brought you to this place. I've cut all lines adrift that moored me to the life I knew. I've set myself adrift. So lead me now, old feet. Take me the way that I must go for Jesu's sake. Godric, who's been merciless to you, casts him upon your mercy now."

RVL would often pray in Discipleship not for a smooth road, but for feet for the path. Sometimes I wonder if those feet might be intended to go unshod every now and then.